1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to network communications, and more particularly to an automatic switching and failover communication system between a cellular mobile communication network and an IP network, and a method implementing the automatic switching communication system.
2. Description of Related Art
Short message, as a popular communication mode, offers transmission of real-time short message between mobile devices. Most of mobile phone users use a mobile phone to send short messages. However, service fee of the short messages of most operators is expensive. Instant messaging software in the mobile phones gains popularity rapidly as smart phones takes over market shares. Instant messaging software can deliver short messages among users registered on the same instant messaging network, at minimum or zero cost. However, it cannot deliver message to user not registered on the particular IM network.
In prior technologies, many instant messaging softwares, such as Fetion of China Mobile, Wechat of Tencent and Windows Live Messenger are capable of offering inexpensive or free service for short message communication. However, they cannot send message between users without registration. In most of the instant messaging softwares, such as Wechat of Tencent and Windows Live Messenger, the user must manually register an account as identification when sending messages. Some of the instant messaging softwares can deliver messages between a computer and a mobile phone. But when User A use both an IM software on a computer and short message on the cell phone to communicate with User B, the context of the conversation is scatters on both devices and software applications. This makes it very inconvenient for User A to keep track and search through the conversation.
FaceTime of Apple Inc. is capable of using a mobile phone number as an identification for an video call, but the mobile phone number is not used as an identifier for short message and the voice calls. In addition, FaceTime is used only on IP networks, and if the user on the other side does not use FaceTime or the other user is offline, Face Time cannot automatically switch to other communication mode automatically, such as traditional voice call over cellular network or short message service over cellular network.
Therefore, a need exists in the industry to overcome the described problems.